Selecting the right suppliers is more important than ever
The drive for tangible benefits associated with business change is greater than ever in today’s economic climate. For many organisations, change is delivered in conjunction with third party suppliers such as system integrators and IT software vendors, and therefore getting value for money through procurement is even more important.
How Berkeley can help you
The Berkeley Partnership, an independent management consultancy, has been helping clients select key partners and third parties for over 20 years. We can help you:
- Develop a sourcing strategy for your organisation, business unit or individual programme or project, covering functions and capabilities to keep in-house vs. what third parties could provide, how third party services can be practically bundled for tendering, and candidate supplier organisations
- Develop the optimum supplier selection approach for each unique situation, choosing the best combinations of Request for Information (RfI), Request for Proposal (RfP), benchmarking and due diligence processes
- Conduct negotiations and agree a commercial contract that is geared for long-term success
- Develop an on-going supplier engagement and management model, to ensure you get the best from the vendor post-selection
- Conduct a relationship healthcheck to determine whether existing relationships – contractual and practical – are set up for success,and help establish joint service improvement plans where required.
The Berkeley difference
Berkeley is uniquely positioned to help you as a result of:
- Our independence: our only agenda is to ensure the optimum partnerships for your organisation. Being a smaller specialist consultancy, we have, for example, no systems integration, software or IT services business ourselves. We don’t compete with any of the organisations likely to be incumbents or to appear on shortlists
- Our supplier selection experience: we have a strong track record of supplier selection and professional services procurement and are asked by clients to manage some of their most critical supplier selection exercises. Our particular area of strength is in choosing potential commercial partners, systems integrators, software vendors and other professional services consultancies. We have a number of approaches, toolkits and templates that can be used as a starting point to accelerate the work
- Our strategy and delivery experience: Berkeley also works with clients to help develop strategies or deliver their most challenging programmes and projects. As an independent consultancy, we often manage multiple third parties on our clients’ behalf, sometimes for periods of months or years. We therefore have practical knowledge of what it takes, and can therefore probe and test vendors during the selection process. We have had first-hand experience of many of the larger system integrators and consultancies and can share that experience during the selection
- Our way of working: we are told time and time again by clients that one of our greatest contributions is our ability to bring different parts of an organisation together very effectively to get things done. Vendor selection is often a great example of when this is paramount. For it to be truly successful, different people from multiple business areas, in-house procurement departments, in-house legal departments and external lawyers as well as specialised external benchmarking organisations must come together effectively and be well engaged in the process.
Read more:
· Critical factors in supplier evaluation and selection
· How Berkeley helped Land Securities with an IT delivery framework
· How Berkeley helped a global consumer goods organisation select suppliers on a critical strategic programme